Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by William Graham Sumner (American Polymath)

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) was a classical liberal American social scientist. He taught social sciences at Yale, where he held the nation’s first professorship in sociology. He was one of the most influential teachers at Yale or any major schools. Sumner was a polymath with numerous books and essays on American history, economic history, political theory, sociology, and anthropology. He introduced the term “ethnocentrism” to identify the roots of imperialism, which he strongly opposed. He was a spokesman against imperialism and in favor of the “forgotten man” of the middle class, a term he coined. He had a long-term influence on conservatism in the United States.

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What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Goodness

If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, arbiter of your destiny, against which you are powerless.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Politics

The invectives against capital in the hands of those who have it, are double-faced, and when turned about are nothing but demands for capital in the hands of those who have it not, in order that they may do with it just what those who have it are now doing with it.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Property

Property is dear to men not only for the sensual pleasure it can afford, but also because it is the bulwark of all they hold dearest on earth, and above all else, because it is the safeguard of those they love most against misery and all physical distress.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Property

The real danger of democracy is, that the classes which have the power under it will assume all the rights and reject all the duties-that is, that they will use the political power to plunder those-who-have.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Democracy

He who would be well taken care of must take care of himself.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Confidence, Self-reliance

Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.
William Graham Sumner

We live in a war of two antagonistic ethical philosophies, the ethical policy taught in the books and schools, and the success policy.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Virtue

It is not the function of the State to make men happy. They must make themselves happy in their own way, and at their own risk. The functions of the State lie entirely in the conditions or chances under which the pursuit of happiness is carried on.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Government

What we prepare for is what we shall get.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Optimism, Positive Attitudes, Health

A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Usefullness

The accumulation of property is no guarantee of the development of character, but the development of character, or of any other good whatever, is impossible without property.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Property

Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Welfare

There is no boon in nature. All the blessings we enjoy are the fruits of labor, toil, self-denial, and study.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Work

There is no such penalty for error and folly as to see one’s children suffer for it.—There is no such reward for a well-spent life as to see one’s children well started in life, owing to their parents’ good health, good principles, fixed character, good breeding, and in general the whole outfit, that enables them to fight the battle of life with success.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Parents

Hunger, love, vanity, and fear. There are four great motives of human action.
William Graham Sumner
Topics: Motivation

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